Hak Vogrin grew up in Brooklyn where he was born in 1920. The family lived in a cold water flat. His parents who immigrated from the old Austro-Hungarian empire never adapted well to city life. His father worked six nights a week; his mother, a housewife, also cleaned other people's houses twice a week.

During World War II Hak worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and on a deep-sea fishing boat in the Gulf of Mexico. For three years in the mid-forties he worked for Merrill Lynch as a margin clerk. He then returned to Florida working at various jobs and, when it was possible, took classes in life drawing at the Amagansatt School of Art in Sarasota.

In 1961, Hak and his wife, Jean, opened a gallery, The One Flight Up, in their apartment on St. Marks Place in New York City where they displayed their own work and that of several friends. Hak became more politically active at this time. He and his wife shared similar views on the civil rights movement and actively supported young men who were avoiding the Vietnam War draft. They moved to the Pine Barrens in 1965 (after reading the Carlton Beck books at the Ottendorfer Branch of the NYPL on Second Avenue) and settled in their present home in the oak and pine woods of Warren Grove by 1967.

Hak always liked to draw; as a kid he copied the comics. In the sixties as part of the underground comics movement, he created comic pages that appeared in Yellow Dog and publications by Print Mint. He contributed cartoons and drawings for the cover of Liberation Magazine and WBAI program guides. His drawings were also published in The Realist, in a New York anarchist publication called Good Soup and as illustrations for works published by Jargon Society and some Small Press poetry reviews.

With the end of the era of optimism - its expectations of greater social, economic and political justice and cooperation - even the tentative supports for environmentally sensitive energy resources and construction by the Carter Administration were abolished. Hak began to shift from small works of humor and fantasy to larger political paintings in oil and acrylics. A series on the extinct birds expanded to include consumerism, animal cruelty and the environment. His work has focused on the U.S. wars in Central America and Iraq, market capitalism, militarism, poverty - at times their interrelationship and psychological origins. He painted the Columbus Series in 1992, based on the diaries of Columbus and de Las Casis, reflecting the tensions between myth and genocide. In 2000, he painted a series of abstractions and began Women Sex Prowess, an erotic/feminist series.

Hak's work has appeared in several shows at the Noyes Museum, Oceanville, NJ, and at the Long Beach Island Art Foundation, including their Distinguished Artists of Southern New Jersey show in 1999. Slides of his paintings were included in concert productions of the NJ Composers Guild. His work has been mentioned in reviews in many New Jersey newspapers, The Philadelphia Inquirer and The New York Times. Full articles on Hak and his work have appeared in the Sandpaper (Long Beach Island, NJ,) Art Matters, and in the January 7, 2001, New York Times. He has also been mentioned in A History of the Underground Comics, by Mark James Estron, Straight Arrow Books, 1974, and in Rebel Visions; the Underground Comix Revolution, 1963-1975, by Patrick Rosenkranz, Fantagraphics, 2002.